Content Providers

Why become a content provider for EEXCESS?

Contributing Content to EEXCESS

We´d like to encourage institutions to make their digital content and metadata discoverable in the Web through the EEXCESS recommendation technology. EEXCESS is not an aggregator or archive, but a broker between cultural, educational or scientific digital content and users who otherwise would perhapsnot be able to find that content. If you are interested in contributing your digitised content to EEXCESS, you will find the basic requirements for participating in the project below.

Organisation

Even if EEXCESS is a research project, the goal is to transform the outcome into stable, productive open source software tools. So you will need to have a governing structure in place that enables your collection to be maintained in the long term. You will need to provide us with a contact person who is able to answer technical and administrative questions about your collections. This also applies for participating during the project phase only.

Online content availability

Institutions willing to contribute to EEXCESS will need to have a strategy in place for publishing their digital content and its metadata online. This could be on their institution’s own website or a hosted service.

Metadata

By metadata we mean catalogue descriptions of the digital content, which provides important information such as the unique identifier, title, description, format, subject, online location and rights in the content item.

EEXCESS is not storing any of the metadata provided. As such, your institution needs to provide an API to access the metadata of your collection.

It is necessary that content providers provide coherent metadata for their digital objects. Coherent means that the metadatais correct and has a unique identifier in form of a dereferencable URL, which assigns a location on the web for the content item and enables EEXCESS to forward users to your organisation.

Metadata standards

EEXCESS accepts metadata about items in partner collections in one of the following intermediary standards: LIDO, EDM. Content providers will be asked therefore to convert their original metadata to one of these standards or to provide the same in an agnostic format so that it can be mapped to the EEXCESS format on the fly. All metadata supplied by content providers to the EEXCESS aggregation infrastructure will be converted, without user intervention, to the EEXCESS Data Format (similar to Europeana Data Model (EDM)).

EEXCESS asks that every digital object is published with a rights label that describes its copyright status. You need to know whether the items that you are providing are covered by copyright or if the copyright has expired (and therefore the item is in the public domain). Institutions contributing to EEXCESS must make sure that information about the copyright status of the items is included in their metadata records.

The EEXCESS Partner Wizard

To make it as easy as possible, also for smaller cultural heritage institutions, to join the EEXCESS recommendation system, we have developed a “Partner Wizard”. This tool will allow you to join by simply filling out a web form: PartnerWizard

Recent Posts

Last week, the EEXCESS Final Conference took place in Cologne, within the frame of the International Science 2.0 Conference.

In the Opening, project ccordinator Prof. Michael Granitzer presented the vision of not only ensuring open access to scientific literature and cultural online objects, but “effortless access” (Slides). Further invited speakers were Timothy Hill from Europeana […]